Lucinda Williams - Car Wheels on a Gravel Road

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• Real Day

Free Music Notes for Car Wheels on a Gravel Road

Free Music Review: Masterpiece of American Life
Hit: 5 Stars

Each of these 14 songs is exquisitely put together, yet during a first listen they come off sounding simple. It is only after multiple listens that we hear the level of craft that went into each song. On Drunken Angel, as she sings about a dead musician, "Blood spilled out from the hole in your heart over the strings of your guitar The worn down places in the wood that once made you feel so good" a quivering harmonica solo reminds us of the fragility of life. Singing about the wall between her and her imprisoned lover in Concrete and Barbed Wire a mournful fiddle enters as her voice begins to crack. Background vocals and an organ are added to the mix as the wall described in the lyrics is constructed musically. The arrangements are so real you can feel the wind blowing in through the screen door, the warmth of the sun pouring down onto the back porch, and you can hear the crunch of the car wheels.

These songs are about remembrance, of the faces of ordinary people in bars, the roads we drive down, past lovers and the familiar places and towns we go to find escape. But unlike many songwriters, where memories are filled with ghosts and a sense of hopelessness pervades every song, Car Wheels is about salvation. It is about the quiet moments during the day, when alone, we find ourselves reflecting on the past. She takes simple moments, often vaguely remembered and turns them into moments of realization, all welded together by her economical prose. Themes that it would take most artists a whole album to convey, Lucinda Williams does in one line. Summing up a relationship in Metal Firecracker, one of the best songs on the album, she sings "All I ask, don't tell anybody the secrets I told you"

Her voice is Dylanesque, range-less, forcing her to wring it dry for all it's worth. She cracks, quivers, whispers, shouts, her voice at once detached, angry, demanding, sorrowful and beautiful. By the time the last song "Jackson", comes on we get the feeling of having taken a journey. It is the perfect album closer. A plaintive guitar ballad about moving on her voice belies the lyrics. All the way to Jackson, I don't think I'll miss you much Once I get to Lafayette, I'm not gonna mind one bit Once I get to Baton Rouge, I won't cry a tear for you Once I get to Vicksburg, I don't think I'll feel an urge All the way to Jackson, I don't think I'll miss you much. It's going to take awhile to escape the pain but with each mile she travels the tears quietly fall, like leaves, to the dirt road and we know that once she gets to Jackson, hope and salvation will be there waiting for her.

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